The Everything Writing Poetry Book (11 page)

Denotation

In a good dictionary, such as
Merriam-Webster's
or
American Heritage
, you will probably see
blue
listed as a noun, its primary definition related to a particular color of a certain electromagnetic wavelength. This definition would be considered the denotative meaning. This meaning may seem ordinary, but it plays an important role in your language, as do the denotative meanings of all English words.

In addition to giving you the denotative definitions of words, a good dictionary will also tell you the history of a word. For example, the word
tawdry
arose from the name of St. Audrey. The word originally described a fine lace necktie, but because the quality of the lace declined over the years, eventually the word came to mean any cheap or shameful object. That's quite a change for a word originally associated with a saint!

Connotation

The dictionary will also list a series of meanings that a word has acquired since its inception. These meanings are the word's connotations. When words have several connotations, a person must rely upon its context to derive its meaning.

Take a look at some of the connotations that the word
blue
has gathered. First,
blue
refers to the color. There are also dress
blues
, a term referring to a military uniform.
Blue
can also mean depressed or melancholy, and from that connotation comes the
blues
, the musical genre. It also appears in the common expressions “blue in the face” and “out of the blue.”

As you can see, this one small word has quite a lot of meaning packed into it. Many other words carry a list of connotative meanings just as long. As a poet, you should do your best to learn as many connotative meanings as possible. Using words with several meanings in your poetry can broaden the scope of your work and can also help you reach a more diverse population of readers.

Category and Function Shift

An idea related to the denotative and connotative meanings of words is
category and function shift
. This shift occurs when words develop uses that they did not previously have. For example, the word
paper
began as a noun naming the sheet of pressed plant fibers you write upon. Then it acquired verb capabilities for use in a sentence like “He will paper her mirror with love notes.”
Paper
can also be used as an adjective, such as in the phrase “paper plate.”

The word
paper
changed categories from noun to verb to adjective without changing spelling. It changed functions, too, since nouns, verbs, and adjectives play different roles in sentences. Shakespeare was a master of creating new meanings for words through category and function shift. For example, he turned the nouns
tongue, boy
, and
peace
into verbs to accommodate his writing purpose.

You might practice this idea of category and function shift by taking a word—perhaps start with the word
yellow
—and using it in a sentence first as a noun, then as a verb, then as an adjective or adverb, all without changing the spelling of the word. Try the exercise again on another word. This is a great way to stretch your language skills and find a fresh use for a familiar word.

Word Choice

When you're searching for a synonym, what book do you pick up? Chances are, you reach for a thesaurus. A thesaurus offers synonyms and antonyms for every word you can find in the dictionary. In fact, the English language includes numerous words that mean virtually the same thing. Isn't that a bit repetitive? Not for a poet! Each and every word has a slightly different pattern of sound and shade of meaning that will create a certain individual effect on your reader. As a result, you have the power of word choice at your disposal.

The sound of a word can be very important to the mood you are establishing in a poem. For example, compare these two separate stanzas:

The old man wrenched
his sack of guts
and hacked a cough

The senior detected
a murmur
in his intestines

You should be able to hear how the hard sounds of the first stanza contrast with the softer sounds of the second. The sounds also affect the meaning and the melody of each line. The old man of the first stanza seems to be in a much worse state than the senior of the second example. The words
hacked
and
cough
echo the hard sounds of the man's coughing, while the words
murmur
and
intestines
in the second example reduce the senior's illness to minor discomfort.

Choosing words for a poem is usually a case of trial and error. You may try anywhere from three to thirty words for one particular spot. The trick is not to give up until you've found the perfect word for the poem. Consult your dictionary, your thesaurus, and even your friends if you're having trouble coming up with the right word to complete a rhyme or end a stanza.

Word Order

While choosing the words for your poems, you will also have to determine the order in which they appear. This choice may seem obvious—you simply put the words together to make sentences, right? Wrong. Organizing the words in a poem is a delicate process that requires much thought and patience.

The precise placement of words in your poems will have a great effect on their combined meaning. For example, here are two sentences that contain exactly the same words:

• I nearly lost $100.

• I lost nearly $100.

Which event would you rather experience? Most likely you would prefer the first event. Though only one word changes position, the meanings of these two sentences are quite different. The first sentence says that you did not lose any money. However, the second says you definitely lost something—maybe $87, $92, or even $99.

More so than many other languages, English depends on word order to make meaning clear. For example, the order of the words in the sentence “The cat ate the mouse” tells us something different from the order “The mouse ate the cat.” Because word order is so important in the language, English has a set series of patterns for phrase and clause construction.

Whenever the basic patterns are changed, however, you must recognize the difference and determine the meaning. For example, if you read “Sarah the ball hits” or “Sarah a mother is,” you can probably figure out that Sarah is the subject in both cases, but you would wonder why
the ball
and
a mother
have been moved. In poetry, moving words in this way can improve a piece. Rearranging words in a unique way can give your poem a stronger meaning or rhythm.

Some examples of altered word order can be seen in Robert Browning's “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” Three appear in the fifth stanza of the poem:

When he finishes refection,
   Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
   As I do, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
   Drinking watered orange-pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
   While he drains his at one gulp!

Browning alters the normal clause pattern when he writes “Knife and fork he never lays/Cross-wise,” “I the Trinity illustrate,” and “In three sips the Arian frustrate.” In the common word order pattern, the first clause would read “He never lays knife and fork cross-wise.” The second would read “I illustrate the Trinity.” And the third would read “Frustrate the Arian in three sips.” But what has Browning gained by altering the pattern? The first and most obvious improvement is that every other line makes a rhyme. By altering the word order, he can rhyme
lays
with
praise
and
illustrate
with
frustrate
.

A second reason for changing the word order has to do with the meaning of the poem itself. The poem is told from the point of view of a monk who feels great indignation toward a fellow monk (the
he
of the poem). His anger, which he keeps internalized, is at odds with his pious actions—his observance of Jesus and the Trinity at the dinner table—and also opposes the calm demeanor that normally characterizes men of faith. The altered word order thus highlights the defiance of the speaker, showing how his frustration has disrupted his life.

When to Use Repetition

Throughout much of your formal education you were probably instructed to avoid repeating words in your writing. Certainly, in the sentence “He put the hat on and the hat sank down over his eyes,” repeating the word
hat
makes the sentence seem choppy and unpolished. Such repetitions can be avoided with a little extra effort.

However, word repetition can work well in poetry. As with music, good repetition in writing can establish a melody that you can use to reinforce a message or strengthen an image. You've already read about rhymes, alliteration, consonance, and assonance; these are good forms of repetition to use in poetry. But there are several other forms of repetition that could be useful to you when writing poetry.

The book
Style and Statement
, written by Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, includes examples of what they call
schemes of repetition
. Following are some of the schemes, given in their original Greek names:

•
Anaphora:
repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of lines or clauses

•
Epistrophe:
repetition of a word or phrase at the end of lines or clauses

•
Epanalepsis:
repetition of a word at the start and the end of a word group

•
Anadiplosis:
repetition of the last word of a group in the next group of words

•
Antimetabole:
reversal of the word order of a pair of phrases

•
Chiasmus:
reversal of the structure of a pair of phrases

•
Polyptoton:
use of words taken from the same root

Here are some examples of these schemes in action:

•
Anaphora:
I am crazy about apple pie. I am crazy about baseball. I am crazy about this great, big country of ours.